When we went to l’eau à LA BOUCHE on Broadway Market, we found a new art bookshop “Artwords Bookshop” on the same street. Artwords Bookshop is the specialist for books, magazines and videos on the contemporary visual arts. There is its first shop on Rivington Street in Shoreditch, near Rivington Place. In compare to the tiny shop on Rivington street, the one on Broadway Market is more spacious and light with its white interior.

Artwordsで買った2枚のカード。見つけた時に可愛いカードを買ってストックしている。

Two greeting cards we bought at Artwords. We buy nice designed cards whenever we find and stock them.

Another art & design book shop in London is Magma books, the famous shop that any artists and creators know. There is a shop on Clerkenwell Road in Clerkenwell, as well as on Earlham Street in Covent Garden. Magma also has a design product shop few steps away from the Covent Garden shop on the same street, and also a branch in Manchester as well. We prefer the Clerkenwell shop because it is bigger and less people, and closer from home.

Circumstance of these independent shops is quite tough now in UK. According to an article in the Telegraph, one in 10 independent bookshops closed last year, at a rate of three a week. Recession is one of the reason, but the evils that let these small shops go bust are the big retailers such as Tesco or Amazon that sell largely discounted book. After the abolition of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) in 1995, which was an arrangement between publishers and booksellers that ensured books could not be offered at discounted prices (I believe Japan still has similar rule), the big retailers can cut the price big with the selling and negotiation power with the publishers and have been in much better positions than small bookshops. Emerging of e-book market and electronic book readers, including Apple’s iPad, could be a final blow to them.

Customers come to a bookshop to find what they want, but buy with cheaper price at a big bookshop, supermarket or online. iPhone app “RedLaser” lets you scan a book’s bar code and find the cheapest price. We also buy books at Amazon if the price is much cheaper and when we are not in hurry, and RedLaser is on our iPhone as well. I feel sorry for the small shops, but it is capitalism that customers go for cheaper prices, and we can’t help these shops by buying books from them, if we are alone. There are not much choice for the small independent shops to survive – either to specialize in one area such as Magma or Artwords, to stock up rare books that are not easy to find, or to give an extra service that other shops don’t. Also going online is a must to reach out to more customers. Unfortunately, the time has changed and small business has to adopt it…